The Kingdom of This World

A 1949 novel by Alejo Carpentier that depicts the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath through a history shaped by myth, ritual, and extraordinary events.

Haitian Revolution: A revolution from 1791 to 1804 in which enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue ended slavery and established Haiti. Its upheavals and aftermath provide the novel’s historical framework.
Ti Noël: A fictional enslaved man in The Kingdom of This World who witnesses successive regimes in Haiti. His changing fortunes connect the novel’s historical episodes.
Alejo Carpentier: A Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist whose fiction drew on Caribbean history and culture. He wrote the novel and articulated the idea of lo real maravilloso.
Caribbean literature: Literature produced across the Caribbean and its diasporas in diverse languages and traditions. The novel became a major work for thinking about Caribbean history through fiction.
Saint-Domingue: The French colony on the western part of Hispaniola that became independent Haiti in 1804. The novel’s early events unfold amid this colony’s plantation society.
Collective memory: The shared representations of a past held and reshaped by a group. The novel makes revolution and political rule legible through remembered experience.
Cuban literature: Literary writing produced in Cuba and by Cuban writers across historical periods and genres. Carpentier’s novel belongs to a wider body of Caribbean literary work.
Postcolonial literature: Literature that examines the cultural, political, and psychological legacies of colonial rule. Its account of revolution and changing rulers raises questions central to postcolonial writing.
Haitian Vodou: A religion formed in Haiti from West African traditions, Catholic influences, and the historical experiences of enslaved people. Vodou beliefs and practices shape the novel’s view of power and reality.
Unreliable narrator: A narrator whose account cannot be accepted as fully accurate or complete. The novel’s shifting presentation complicates any single authoritative account of events.

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